Back in 2004, the blogger known as “Mister Bachelor” was swinging at the top of his middle-aged game — collecting women and readers (nearly 8,000) — with salacious tales of his Lothario lifestyle.

He was revered and reviled and loving every minute of it.

Then he fell in love, and with that it was all downhill — for the blog, that is.

Earlier this year, the once frolicking Mister Bachelor of heavy Web traffic and outraged comments was laid to rest. In its place, The Blog and Chain was born, snarky and sardonic but devoid of sex and drama. At last count, it had fewer than 150 readers, according to the reformed Mister Bachelor, who now goes by the alias Daedalus.

Personal blogs are like child stars. Some soar too quickly and die too young. Others drop out, lay low for a while and come back stronger than ever. More often, they return reinvented, uninspired and lackluster, missing that special something that used to leave audiences wanting more.

Blogs are born, blogs die — it’s a cycle as old as blogging itself, said Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming and Why It Matters.

“Things grow and mature, and then they reach their end,” he said. “That’s the shape of our lives.”

Blogs end up in the virtual graveyard for as many reasons as they came into being in the first place. Sometimes, the bloggers get out of their system whatever they wanted to say. Or they reach the fame they were after. Other times, they just give up.

“In some cases people stop because they achieve their goal,” Rosenberg said. “Others stop because they’ll never achieve their goal.”

Such Great Heights had a very public execution when its author, known as Clink, decided she’d had enough.

“I just don’t feel the need to dissect my life anymore,” she wrote. “Not because it’s perfect ... but because it’s … full.”

A funeral procession of more than 100 comments mourned its passing.

When Katie Morton killed her first blog, I Am, Therefore I Date, she didn’t stop blogging. Rather, she moved on to another that revealed her new life and real name.

I Am, Therefore I Date chronicled Morton’s romantic and sexual adventures but in the guise of her alter ego, Roxy Chanel McPink. It lured more than 400,000 readers in its three-year lifespan.

Then she met Mr. Right. He discovered the blog, and she wrote about that. When they got engaged, she began blogging on marital bliss at at KatieMorton.com.

While her die-hard fans have stuck with her, readership is much more uneven from month to month.

Blog deaths and reincarnations are so commonplace that Du Wax Loolu blogger Jessica Volk finds it hard to keep up.

“I have seen many other bloggers move,” Volk said, “either because they felt that their old blog was no longer an accurate representation of their life, or because they wanted to become more or less anonymous or because they had attracted readers that they wished to avoid.”

Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook may be contributing to the demise of blogs.

“With Facebook and Twitter, there are a lot easier ways to keep up with people’s personal lives than personal blogging,” said Simon Owens, who tracks social media at Bloggasm.com.

Dawn Swinson chucked her personal blog and has replaced it with long and personal ramblings with up to 50 bursts a day on Twitter.

As @lightskinnnn38, she has shared such revelations as, “Dang it, Got a mosquito bite on my foot. Itches like CRAZY! and insights such as, “Ugh, it’s annoying when people don’t answer their cell phones.”

Jessica Cutler has birthed and buried four blogs and is authoring a fifth. But she’s never matched the fame of her 2003 effort, Washingtonienne, which lasted just 13 days but scandalized the nation’s capital by chronicling her liaisons with Washington power brokers. The notoriety led to what she termed a “mini-career” of writing about herself. She penned pieces for high-profile media outlets, usually about sex or scandal, posed for Playboy and wrote a book,Washingtonienne, that is being made into an HBO series.

Now happily married and pregnant, Cutler seems ambivalent toward her blog-earned fame. When the URL on JessicaCutlerOnline expired, she just let it die. Her latest blog is a hodgepodge of domestic fare and profane but witty observation. Blogs, Cutler has concluded, are “like trees falling in a forest.